


Last Rites

by qualapec



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, M/M, friends to lovers to enemies to lovers to friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 12:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qualapec/pseuds/qualapec
Summary: After the fall, after the recall, after the reformation. There's a hunt, a hotel room, a sickness, and two men who used to know each other.





	Last Rites

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this for the CLASSIFIED: A Blackwatch Zine a while ago, but only just got around to posting it. I'd love to write more Overwatch fanfic with this scenario, but here's the story snippet as it appeared in the zine!
> 
> I had an absolute blast being published with @blackwatchzine . Everyone involved really was fantastic, and the final book is beautiful.
> 
> TW for discussion of a terminal illness.

Daylight filtered into the hotel room through overcast and through the blinds, creating pale blue bands against cigar smoke. McCree sat on the bed, propped up by the headboard with every one of the pillows under his back. Reaper noticed that the silvery lighting brought out the few gray strands in McCree’s otherwise dark hair. He smoked, and was visibly trying to hide how much it hurt to breathe. Reaper didn't understand why he was trying to conceal it, because he'd helped McCree bandage his ribs, but some things never changed.

McCree’s hat was on the night stand, the hat with the Blackwatch badge pinned to the front. Both relics, both kept when it would have been smarter to leave them in an incinerator.

Gabriel Reyes had needed sleep, but Reaper didn't. Given enough time, his wounds healed themselves. And he’d never developed the same proclivity for hedonism that Jesse McCree had. The detour for McCree to rest was, in most ways, an enormous waste of time—but he valued his patience. It wouldn't be productive to go alone. Reaper leaned on the wall while McCree took slow drags, hands shaking.

"So, you’ve been brought back to the fold?" McCree asked, smoke puffing out with every word.

Reaper had been expecting the question. "Only until we find Sombra." Along with the shadowy ‘Ivan,’ for whom she'd betrayed Talon and Overwatch alike. He cracked his neck. Something in him shifted, snapped into place. "After that, we’ll see."

"Thought it might be something like that." McCree laughed. His voice was cracked with years of damage from tobacco, alcohol, and dry weather. His skin was somewhat looser than the last time Reaper saw him, the muscles underneath, however, he recognized. The effect was a good one.

McCree knocked ash off the end of his cigar. "Can I help you?"

"I'm sorry?"

McCree’s lip dipped down and his eyebrow rose. Reaper thought he glimpsed a broken tooth. "You’re kinda just…standing in a corner. Staring at me."

"I'm waiting." His temper threatened to flare up. "What else am I going to look at?"

McCree met Reaper’s gaze, which meant half looking at where he probably thought Reaper’s eyes were and half scanning over the mask.

"It's a little creepy, with the…thing." McCree gestured to his own face with his palm. "Why don't you take it off?"

Still a brat. Reaper crossed his arms, firmly, and said, "No."

McCree shrugged. "Fine."

A car horn blared from the street. A cart rolled down the hall outside. Reaper did feel a nagging from his conscience, a weakness he thought he left behind, like he needed to clarify. "It's better that way."

"I could be the judge of that."

Reaper tilted his head and refrained from pointing out how historically flawed Jesse’s judgement was.

McCree? Jesse? Jesse. Dark nights and limbs and lips on bodies behind the ordinance shed. A long time ago, different men, both vibrantly alive.

Reaper ignored the cresting ache, and McCree let it drop.

McCree took the cigar in hand and shuddered as he brought it to his lips.

Beneath his mask, Reaper focused. He thought about the decisive fire fight in the diner, he thought about seeing McCree in Nepal for the first time in years, he thought about Sombra’s report from when she'd tracked him down on Reaper’s orders. "I thought you said this cowboy had a steady hand?"

"That's new," Reaper said, immediately noticing and disliking how much Gabriel he had in his voice.

McCree leaned back, exposed his throat as he stretched, and took another drag. "Sure is."

"Are you going to tell me why a steady shot has shaking hands?"

"It's not the booze, if that's what you're thinking."

 _Careful, Jesse._ Reaper stayed perfectly still—that was one wonderfully unsettling aspect of his new form. He'd always been more patient than Jesse—than McCree—and could usually get him to confess.

McCree glared up at him as he reached over to the ash tray, snubbing out the rest of the cigar. He lifted up his metal arm. "You heard about the EMP in London."

Reaper nodded. Everyone had. Thousands of omnics deactivated at once. Led by a small team of criminals, the operation made King's Row into the site of a massacre for the second time.

"I was in the field heading Overwatch's new special ops," McCree said. "My first goddamn mission since the recall. We were fighting to the last man, but the payload hit the red zone. Maximum casualties."

"And?"

"Turns out, an EMP fucks with nanotech." McCree broke off. "Ain't that a thing, when the stuff that keeps us alive goes bad?"

Reaper was all too aware. Beneath his mask, he squeezed his eyes shut. He knew where the story was headed—it was never good when lots of little robots within a human body suddenly stopped working, started breaking down where it was supposed to build, or started building in the wrong places. He'd thought something was off, felt it in his ever-shifting bones every time McCree spoke, every time he pulled the trigger. He assumed it was the sting of lost familiarity. Despite all evidence, sickness hadn't occurred to him as a possibility.

"Dr. Ziegler cleared you for the field." Reaper reached the conclusion quickly. "Ana can't approve."

"Ana doesn't know." McCree chuckled. "Angela's working on it."

Everything fell into place, why McCree had demanded to work with him after his temporary truce with Overwatch. Reaper felt an old, old ache. "You should be at home."

"Only home I had blew up," McCree snapped like a whip, and Reaper's own mood darkened as the words sank in. McCree, realizing what he'd said, twisted away, fidgeted.

"It's fine," McCree declared. "No one from Blackwatch was ever gonna die in our beds, you told me that."

 _Did I?_ It sounded like something Gabriel Reyes would have said, before he knew about the cliff and the bottomless sea on the other side, the nothingness a step away. Death took all, but he'd never wanted to outlive Jesse, not really. In his rage, perhaps—

—but with Jesse McCree sitting in front of him, so clearly the man he'd recruited, he'd helped, he'd worked with, and he'd mentored, life felt so much crueler.

"I told you Blackwatch was for penitence."

McCree was staring at his hands, face stony. "I'm running out of time to be redeemed."

Reaper took a deep breath and stalked over to the cheap, cookie-cutter hotel reading chair catty-cornered to the bed. It was the kind of pale green he couldn't stand, but he took his seat in his big jacket and body armor. The procession had to look ridiculous. McCree was watching him, not sure what to make of it, but Reaper didn't want to overthink it, because if he did, he wouldn't do it.

He removed his mask.

McCree went dead silent. He opened his mouth to take a breath, and it stayed open. Remembering his manners, he shut it. He kept looking, met Reaper's challenge, accepted his offer.

"Well. Shit."

It was Reaper's turn to laugh. It floated from his throat, echoing with a voice other than his. Two notes escaped like a chorus, like something trying to break through a thin human membrane. He blinked away shadows at his vision. "Do I frighten you?"

"No more than when you were my commander."

Reaper appreciated that. The fleeting feeling that everything that had happened could be forgiven. Every sin could be swept aside, and they could begin again from the end.

But that wasn't how things went, usually. "How long?"

"Angela's not sure."

"But until then," Reaper said, "we search for Sombra together."

McCree probably sensed the out that Reaper was offering him—the indication that Gabriel was still there, that he understood, and that he wouldn't tell Ana—because he smirked. It reminded Reaper of everything that was, that could have been different, and that maybe still could.

"'Til then, Gabe."

 

THE END


End file.
